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Week ahead: Facebook mail? TV retransmisssion fees

By
Cecilia Kang

Two events worth following this week:

1) Facebook's announcement on Monday, 1 p.m. EST of what is expected to be a new e-mail service, among other communications tools, according to the New York Times. This is significant because the social networking titan, which is breaking nearly every metric on the Web (time spent, traffic, news dissemination, display ads) could capture part of the market for a massively important app for desktop and mobile devices, one currently dominated by Google and Microsoft. Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder, told Post Tech that one way to identify the most important information platforms is to look at those that people visit most often and on which they are most engaged. Some examples, Hughes said, are Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and an an assortment of "longtail" sites catering to individual interests.

2) On Wednesday at 2:30 p.m.., the Senate communications subcommittee will hold a retransmission fees hearing. The hearing will look at increasingly big and ugly fights between broadcasters and cable/satellite firms over retransmission contracts. But more interesting will be how lawmakers address view the way that these battles bleed into Internet television. Fox blocked its Web shows from Cablevision as a part of negotiations. Let's see how far they get in working out a new role for the FCC, which doesn't have a lot of say at this point over such deals. Next up? Sinclair vs. Time Warner Cable, deadline midnight New Year's Eve.

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